The three actors Benicio del Toro has always idolised: “I still look up to those guys”
Actors having political affiliations or spending a considerable amount of time on activism is no new thing; Marlon Brando and Jane Fonda were doing it half a century ago, bravely using their platform to outline social injustice, the suffering of indigenous people and the folly of constant war. These days, we have Benicio del Toro.
The actor is particularly vocal about working to have more Latino stories in movies, and his support of marginalised, undocumented people and anyone who loves films will have been blown away by his performance in One Battle After Another last year. You got the feeling that de Toro completely lived and breathed his role as Sergio St Carlos, the coolest karate teacher in history and the unofficial leader of a community of immigrants hiding out from the authorities.
Del Toro is almost unjustifiably cool in the film, a model of how to be completely unflustered by any situation unfolding around you no matter how chaotic or potentially deadly, and very much like Leonardo DiCaprio shouting ‘Viva la revolucion!’ at him you distinctly felt that had you been there you would have done exactly the same and followed him blindly into battle despite not knowing him from Adam.
Now 58, the Puerto Rican actor has been a mainstay in Hollywood for three decades, but it seems he’s really coming into his own now, able to put in a performance like he did in Paul Thomas Anderson’s epic that blended the comedy of his part in Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme with some of the more action-packed elements present in his role as an assassin in Denis Villeneuve’s ‘tense as they come’ border thriller Sicario.
Ironically, it was due to his filming Wes Anderson’s movie that he very nearly missed being in the other Anderson’s movie, because it caused OBAA to be delayed for three months while he finished up the other role, so integral was he to the film opposite DiCaprio. But once he was on set, apparently his feedback and input into his character was so good that many lines and scenes were rewritten.
Del Toro will be even more in demand when he either wins or comes close to a Golden Globe and an Oscar come March, and in terms of his own award-winning influences, he names actors who in the past equally blended action with more sensitive roles in big movies spanning decades.
Speaking about his OBAA castmate Sean Penn, as well as Slow Horses star Gary Oldman and The Wrestler’s Mickey Rourke, del Toro said: “I still look up to those guys,” but wouldn’t be drawn on whether he feels he’s done enough to be ranked alongside them as yet, adding: “I don’t know, I think someone else needs to define that.”
Del Toro will now move on to filming Reenactment this month with Cameron Diaz and Ana de Armas, a film directed by Grant Singer, who cast Del Toro in his debut movie, 2023’s Reptile. That was a movie co-starring Justin Timberlake about a New England detective trying to unravel a twisting murder case, and it fared better with audiences than critics.
He’s also part of the long-awaited project written and directed by Jamie Foxx called All-Star Weekend, a basketball-based film that has been in production in some shape or form all the way back to 2016 and also stars a host of big names, including Robert Downey Jr, Jeremy Piven and Eva Longoria.
